Lyn Bishop : Sharing Secrets

All too often I hear people say “I’m not creative” and then they whip up some amazing food from random stuff in their cupboards, or grow beautiful flowers in their gardens, or write amazingly descriptive business plans. These are all excellent examples of creativity in action.

The past few weeks I’ve been experiencing an increased sense of needing to express my creativity. I’ve set up a small studio in my bedroom (it’s only a table, but it’s my studio at the moment) and been working on some small scale mixed-media projects. In the evenings, I’ve been baking christmas cookies.

There is something about cooking and baking that satisfies the need to create. By combining ingredients, mixing, chopping, scooping, we engage in creativity in action. Cooking is Art, and for many of us, it is often the most creative act we perform in our daily lives.

Even in our failures, like the Brownie Top Thins that were this years disaster, we still find new ideas, new thinking about what could have been done differently. Its similar to how I feel when I pull a print I’m not crazy about – it leads me to new thoughts, and taking the next step.

So. in this festive season of celebration, take some time to honor the creativity within you. It might be expressed in wrapping presents, in cooking a special meal, in decorating your tree, or in writing your holiday greeting. Whatever it is, give yourself credit for being creative.

Recipe Index:
Brownies
Chocolate Peppermint
Mexican Wedding
Oatmeal Raisin
Peanut Butter Chocolate
Thumbprints (shown in 1st photo)

The end of the year is always a time where many of us become introspective, thinking about the past 12 months and the upcoming new year ahead. For many years now, I have approached this process with anticipation, sprawled on my studio floor with a large piece of paper, crayons or markers, and mapped out the stepping stones to accomplish my dreams for the year to come.

I skipped over this process in 2009 and 2010. My life was in turmoil at the beginning of 2009 and I had too much sadness and fear in my heart to allow myself the luxury of my yearly dream session. I stumbled through 2009 relearning how to live without a master plan. I lived in the moment, and followed my heart from one adventure to the next.

Then came 2010, and I felt a tugging to get back on my path again. January came and nudged me to plan for my yearly dreams. I had some ideas, but nothing seemed solid, so I let go of all expectations, continued to listen to my heart and allowed myself the freedom to explore without feeling there needed to be some goal at the end of the experience.

This freedom of living moment to moment was refreshingly new for me, and during that time I felt that I could hear my inner voice that had been shut out by all the “you should” things in life. “You should work on your relationship”, “You should go back to graduate school”, “You should move to San Francisco”. I found new ways of being in the world, ways that were more intuitive, more in tune to nature, and to my own rhythms of life.

After this time of living without schedules, goals or objectives, I found a deeper trust in my own instincts, and found I was hearing my inner voice more clearly. That voice continued to become louder throughout 2010 and began to lead me out of the dense jungle of all possibilities and back onto my life path. Those jungle experiences have given me the opportunity to reevaluate my diverse life skills and rearrange them in ways that lead me in new directions that I could never have found without stumbling along without a plan in the jungle of life for a while.

As I approach 2011, I see my vision clearly, and know that the quiet time I spent without a master plan is leading me into my biggest dreams yet as I step out of the jungle and onto the road to manifest my life’s work. I am again luxuriating in the process of designing and planning my dreams.

Resources for Inspired Action or Non Action:

LifeHack: Why Doing Nothing May Be The Best Action Of All

Lisa Sonora Beam’s Goal Setting for Creatives

Poco a Poco, it’s an everyday Spanish phrase for little by little. That’s the best way to describe my process for the past two years while this blog sat quietly, patiently awaiting my return to the creative process. Life changes do that to you – make you quite for awhile.

It’s been almost two years since I left the comfort of my Bay Area lifestyle, with so many friends and creative opportunities all around me. I moved first to Costa Rica, and then began spending my time between Costa Rica and Panama, and now, I’m living full time in Panama, in a mountain community where the air is fresh and the hills are always green.

I’ve had small periods of creativity and artmaking, but lacking a studio space it was difficult to spread out and enjoy the process. That was only an excuse. The reality was I just wasn’t ready to let myself luxuriate in the beauty of art. Instead, I embraced nature and the wonders of the tropical rainforest jungle, exploring a world that was totally new to me.

But these days I’m feeling the pull of my creative spirit, and feel the deep need to embrace my process again. My materials are changing, as I don’t have all the high tech goodies to play with here, but the fundamental current of my creative spirit remains, and is calling me to come out and play again.

As I recreate my art and my life here in Panama, I am embracing the fact that I have always been a Creative Entrepreneur. I want to thank @VenessaMiemis for sharing her plans to attend a Creative Entrepreneur workshop in Mexico, and giving me the courage to visit Lisa Sonora Beam’s blog site which gave me the kick in the pants I needed to begin writing again and sharing my creative life with you once more.

Shakespeare Santa Cruz is on the verge of permanent shutdown. The 27 year old company is one of the countries best, and provides Santa Cruz and the community with culturally rich artistic performances to attend and enjoy.

The budget cuts inflicted upon the University of California system have required reductions of 1.1 million to the Arts Division, where Shakespeare Santa Cruz resides. This huge amount is in addition to previous cuts already made this year.

An urgent message posted to their website reads: “Our challenge is simply put – raise $300,000 in a week’s time or cease to exist. Talk about “to be or not to be”? The question is, can you help? Yes you can. Click here to donate immediately, or keep reading to get further energized! Do it NOW or forever hold your peace. Read the rest of this entry »

Artist Josiah McElheny has been collaborating with cosmologist David Weinberg, Ph.D. on a series of objects that reflect cosmological theories such as the Big Bang. Walking into the lobby of the Phoenix Art Museum last night was to come face to face with McElheny’s The Last Scattering Surface, a large glass sculpture that seeks to explore issues of modernism and cosmology.

The work, hung at eye level at the museum entrance,  is a handsome piece that pulls us back to a late 1960′s aesthetic. A central glowing orb made of multiple smaller lights explode outward in space, forming clusters of glass galaxies at each endpoint. Read the rest of this entry »